Magpie Monday

For me, the big comics news last week (well, the week before last; I ran out of space and time to post everything I wanted to last week) was the reveal of some of J.H. Williams III‘s work on the new Sandman comic, titled The Sandman: Overture, the first issue of which will appear on October 30th. Below is the cover of the first issue as well as a portrait of Dream. Consider me in love.

PopChartLab has a new infographic for sale that will appeal to super-hero nerds everywhere: The Giant-Size Omnibus of Superpowers, a “sprawling taxonomy of over 200 superpowers and 600 superheroes and villains.” I love the design—it looks like one of those comics from the 1960s and 1970s I loved to get because they had so many stories in them! Click the image below or the link above to do some zooming. Via.

I really like the opening sequence for the new Beware the Batman series on Cartoon Network, but I find the red a curious choice. Via.

Super-Team Family has had some great mash-up covers the last couple weeks, including Angel and Hawkgirl, Sandman and Rorschach, Black Canary and Mockingbird (I never noticed how similar these characters were until reading this post), and The Atom and Machine Man (love the combined artwork of Gil Kane and Barry Windsor-Smith). I was really pleased by this mash-up of The Phantom Stranger (a character I’ve always loved, though I wasn’t enchanted by the first trade of his new series) and the Death Star.

I like Adam Hughes’ art a lot, this variant cover for Teen Titans included, but I’ve never understood why artists are so inclined to make Raven look like she has some sort of spinal contortion, which I feel like must go back to George Pérez’s creation of the character. Via.

The OpenBook Chair from Studio Tilt. What more could you want? Click the link or the image to see more amazeballs shots of this chair. Via.

The OpenBook Chair by Studio Tilt

The latest reveals of the new Harry Potter covers by Kazu Kibuishi:

Cover art by Kazu Kibuishi

Cover art by Kazu Kibuishi

Speaking of J.K. Rowling, did you know she wrote another crime book, released in March, under a pseudonym?

Mailbooks for Good is a great project, partnered with Random House Australia, wherein paperback book covers convert to envelopes, so you can mail the book to a literacy charity once you’ve finished reading it. Very cool. Via.

"How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton